Wednesday, 12 August 2015

TweetOver the past
week, there have been a number of events to mark the 70th
anniversary of the dropping of nuclear bombs on two Japanese cities at the end
of the Second World War.And media
coverage has been accompanied by some of the usual rationalisations for the
action taken, and for the continued possession of nuclear weapons.

The customary
justification of those who support the use made of the weapons is that it
helped to end the war early, and saved more lives than it cost.I’ll admit that I don’t know if that’s true
or not; the nature of history is that we can only ever live it once, we can’t
go back and do something different to see what would have happened.There is some evidence in support of the view
that more lives were saved than taken, but there is also plenty of evidence
against it.

Bridgend’s Green Leftie has set out some of the evidence to
suggest that the argument about saving more lives than it cost wasn’t true –
and that the people involved had enough knowledge at the time to know that what
they were saying was untrue.Maybe.It looks convincing to me, but then I start
from a pre-disposition to believe that.

But let’s give
those who justify the bombings the benefit of the doubt for a moment, and
assume that they really did believe that what they were doing was the lesser of
two evils.It seems to me that even on
the basis of that assumption, there are two serious questions to be asked
before one can excuse their actions.

The first is
whether there really were only two choices – all out land invasion fighting
inch by inch over the Japanese islands or dropping atomic bombs to annihilate
two cities.Reducing the options to two
is a technique often used to justify taking a particular course of action; but
such a simplistic binary choice rarely reflects the subtleties of life in the
real world.The argument that it saved
more lives than it cost stands up only if we accept the premise that there were
only two choices; those making that argument are wilfully over-simplifying.

But the second
question is, for me, the crucial one.Even
supposing it were true, on what basis does any civilised human being decide
that killing 200,000 plus citizens, selected solely on the basis of where they
live, in an act of deliberate mass extermination, is ‘better’ than the
possibility that a greater number will die elsewhere, based on what can only be
estimates and guesses?It’s not that I
don’t understand the mathematics of it – it’s as simple as believing that X is
greater than Y.But it’s the
dehumanisation involved which is the issue; the treating of people with names
and families as just numbers whose lives can be weighed and valued against the
lives of others as though on a giant set of scales.

It’s too easy
to dismiss that attitude as the product of a vicious total war which had
already raged for 6 years and taken millions of lives.It might, almost, be comprehensible (even if
not excusable) in that context.But
those who support the continued possession of weapons of mass destruction are
effectively applying the same type of judgement today, because there is no
purpose at all in possessing such weapons unless those who possess them are
willing to use them.

That includes
every UK Prime Minister, Tory and Labour alike, since the end of the war in
which nuclear weapons were first used.All of them, even free of the pressures of immediate war, have
effectively declared their willingness to eliminate whole cities and all those
who live in them, selected for death solely on the basis of location.

The lesson
which we should learn from Hiroshima and Nagasaki is that it should never
happen again.The lesson which our ‘leaders’
actually seem to have learnt is that possessing the biggest stick and being
willing to use it on randomly selected victims allows the big boys to get their
own way in the world.